


Turning Tides

by Kogiopsis



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, SANDERSON Brandon - Works, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: F/F, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 18:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3299096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kogiopsis/pseuds/Kogiopsis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The mermaid, of course, wanted legs. She told the sea witch that she wanted to see the wider world and learn and grow. The witch looked her over, from blue tailtip to wide eyes and curly cloud of hair, and refused.</p><p>This idea is Queenofthewilis' fault.  She knows what she did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turning Tides

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been [translated into Chinese](http://yeqing-f.lofter.com/post/1cba352b_ba0c57d) by CalendaeKel!

It began much like a story you already know: once upon a time, a young red-headed mermaid sought out a heretic sea witch to ask her for a spell.

 

The mermaid, of course, wanted legs. She told the sea witch that she wanted to see the wider world and learn and grow. The witch looked her over, from blue tailtip to wide eyes and curly cloud of hair, and refused.

"You do not know what you ask," she said.

"So teach me!" the mermaid replied.

The witch shook her head. “I have taught others in the past. None have been able to learn. You will be no different.”

She intended that that would be the end of it, but it was not. Day after day, when the witch left the cave where she lived, she found the blue-tailed mermaid outside the entrance. Sometimes she was toying with some bit of human detritus she had found; sometimes tracing lines in the silt of the seafloor with her fingertip; sometimes turning the shell of some dead thing over and over in her hands. The witch began venturing out at odd hours to see if she could avoid her unwanted visitor, but the mermaid was always there. The witch began to wonder when and where she slept.

Finally, after almost half a tide cycle, she gave in. Instead of ignoring the mermaid as she left, she stopped with a flick of her tail and waited for the girl to notice her.

"I will teach you until the full moon," she said without preamble. "If you have shown an aptitude by then, you can stay. If not, you will leave and I will never see you again. Agreed?"

The mermaid’s eyes had grown wider and wider as she spoke, and at the end of the sentence she nodded once, emphatically.

And so they began.

***

The mermaid stayed past the full moon, and the one after that, and on the third full moon she performed for herself the spell she had wanted all along. The sea witch took her into shallow water first and stayed there, bobbing at the surface with her dark hair spread out across the waves like oil, until the girl stumbled onto dry land at last. She waited longer afterwards, than she had intended, watching her protege learn to use her new limbs and pick her way carefully along the beach, but finally tore herself away with a twist of her tail and dove back to her home at the bottom of the ocean.

It was her home now, as it had been before, but it had been  _their_  home for a while and she almost thought of it as such for a moment as she swam inside. The past months had been… surprisingly pleasant, she had found; having company had made a nice change, and the mermaid was - had been - so eager to learn. She’d smiled often, the feeling unfamilliar after her years of solitude.

Her lips stretched now, mimicking the expression out of memory; but it was not a true smile, and soon her face was solemn once more.

She tried to return to her peaceful routine from the time before that interruption, and for the most part she succeeded, but she found herself in shallow water more often than usual and couldn’t help staring, sometimes, at the beach where her pupil had gone ashore.

She told herself she wasn’t lonely.

***

She had told the mermaid things about herself, things she rarely spoke of. About her father, killed when she was young, and her brother who ruled a sea kingdom to the north; about her education and her magic, and learning in secret how to use it through careful trial and error. After she’d realized that the mermaid had a similar gift, she found herself pouring out more and more. Here at last was someone who could listen and understand. Here was kith where she had only ever had kin.

The deep-water coral didn’t respond when she spoke to it, out of habit and needing to hear her own voice. The fish swam away. Crabs waved pincers menacingly and she twitched her tailfin out of their reach.

She began to visit the beach more and more often, floating far out with just her eyes above the surface at low tide, resting on rocks cut off from the shore by waves at high tide. The land didn’t call to her as it did others - or at least she felt no desire to walk on it. She simply wanted to be there, watching it. In case…

And one day it happened. Sharp voices rang out over the sound of the waves and she became alert, lifting her head from the water to try and figure out where they were coming from. Running along the beach before her were four figures, one ahead and three following. The one at the forefront was dressed all in blue and had - the witch’s breath hitched a little - very familiar red hair which bounced as she ran. The three behind her wore identical uniforms, and one of them held something long and glinting in his hand.

The girl-who-had-been-a-mermaid was speaking, her mouth moving rapidly though the witch could not hear her words, clutching a bundle to her chest. She ran down the beach to the water’s edge and then veered sideways, to where a jutting rocky shoulder held tidepools, running as quickly as possible over the barnacles and mussels to the end, where waves broke against the dark stone. Then with a last desperate shout, her voice cracking on a final syllable, she threw herself into the air and fell, flailing and striking a cresting wave with a resounding splash.

The witch heard the shouts of the following men for just a moment before she dived under the water, riding the energy of the waves just beneath the surface to reach the shoreline as quickly as possible. She could see, though the water was far from clear, a flash of blue at the bottom, and when she dove down she found the girl in her blue dress, arms still crossed over her chest, eyes closed and cheeks puffy with held breath. The witch, frantic, seized her around the waist and swam out to sea as fast as she could manage.

She was forced to surface when a hand shoved against her side, making sharp and agonizing contact with her gills. Air bubbles rushed out of her mouth in a gasp and she surged towards the light, almost but not quite losing her grip on the girl. As they burst through the waves she sucked in a long breath, then let part of it out as a hiss of pain as her side throbbed sharply.

Coughing and spluttering told her that the girl had surfaced as well, and for the first time since her frantic rescue she looked over at its object. Wet hair was draped over her face and she was attempting to clear it away one-handed. The witch, without really thinking, reached out and gently nudged that hand away to do it herself.

When the girl could see, she blinked once but showed no other expression of surprise. Instead, she looked a bit rueful.

"I did it wrong, didn’t I?"

"You did what - oh." Suddenly the witch realized - the shouting, the dramatic dive into the water. She had been remiss in her teachings.

"Reversing the transformation uses a different spell," she said. "I assumed… I never taught it to you because I assumed you would never need it."

The girl, who had been awkwardly treading water with her unwieldy human legs, stopped for a moment and nearly sank. The witch reached out to catch her by the waist and steadied her until she could keep herself afloat again.

"Oh," the girl said. "You… thought I wouldn’t want to come back."

The witch shrugged, her lips pressed together tightly. “Few do. And you’d spoken of wanting to learn and travel - it seemed only natural.”

The silence between them was filled by the soft sounds of the water for a long moment.

"Will you reverse the spell, then?" the girl asked, averting her eyes from those of the witch.

For an instant it was as if they had only just met, and she was a strange mermaid asking for a stranger favor, and the witch almost declined out of sheer habit - but she looked at the face before her and found she could not.

"Of course," she said, and began the chant.

***

The witch had to remove the mermaid’s human dress, which buttoned most inconveniently up the back. It was clumsy work with the fabric so waterlogged, but she finished as quickly as possible and tried not to let her fingertips linger against the bare skin of the other woman’s back for too long.

They let the dress fall, drifting slowly through the dark water and out of sight. The mermaid flicked her reclaimed tail and sighed happily. Without discussion, the witch led the way back to her cave and the mermaid followed, as if it were the most natural thing in the ocean.

It almost was.

***

They didn’t talk about it until two days later, and if the witch had not grown impatient with the mermaid’s uncharacteristic silence it would have been longer.

"So what did you do that made the humans chase you?"

The mermaid bit her lip, but remained silent.

"I turned you back," the witch reminded her, voice sharp. "You owe me this at least."

"I stole from them," the mermaid said. "Jewelry, something enchanted."

The witch raised an eyebrow. “Why steal magic from the humans when you have so much of your own?”

The mermaid hesitated, then said, “It… I didn’t know that I did, when I first asked you to turn me human. And I think it does something unlike anything you’ve taught me. I’ll find out soon enough.” She paused. “I… have to leave soon. My family is counting on me to bring this back to them. I’ve been too long already.”

Something in the witch’s chest tightened. This was the first time the mermaid had mentioned a family, for all that they’d talked, and certainly the first time she’d given a reason for wanting to become human other than sheer curiosity.

"I understand," was all she said, and they spoke no more that evening.

***

The mermaid left soon after that and once again the witch tried to tell herself that she wasn’t lonely. She was less successful this time; it was hard to deny the pattern evident in these two instances. When the mermaid left, melancholy took her place. There was little sense in denying it. At least, the witch thought, this would be the last time. She’d never see her erstwhile pupil again.

It took slightly over a month for her to be proven wrong, but wrong she was. Without warning, the mermaid showed up at the cave again; the witch found her one day loitering where she had when she was begging to be taught magic, turning a clam shell idly over and over in her fingers. She looked up when the witch exited the cave and the corners of her lips twitched in a small smile at the expression of shock triggered by her presence.

"Hello," she said. "I apologize for being away for so long."

The witch felt that she couldn’t move, could barely think. The mermaid approached her very slowly and held out a hesitant hand, brushing her fingers over the witch’s cheek.

"I promise not to leave again," she said. Her other hand came up to rest against the witch’s other cheek and, as inexorably as the tides, she pulled their faces together for a slow, gentle kiss.

Without thinking the witch reached up to tangle one hand in the mermaid’s hair, pulling her closer, and rested another on the small of her back just above where her skin gave way to scales.  Their tails twined around each other and the witch found herself wondering if this euphoria, this sense of having found something  _true_ , was what drove merfolk to give up the sea and walk on land.


End file.
